Top 15 quotes by Gordon Allport

This American theorist talked about personality, prejudice and bias.

Gordon Allport (United States, 1897 - 1967) was a prominent American psychologist who devoted his life to research on human personality.

Despite his enormous influence in the field of human psychology, Gordon Allport is an often forgotten figure when listing the leading psychologists of the 20th century. Professor of the prestigious Harvard University, among those who were his disciples we can find such famous names as Jerome Bruner, Stanley Milgram or Thomas Pettigrew.

Gordon Allport's Famous Quotes and Phrases

All in all, Allport's contributions are priceless and he is one of the most studied theorists in Psychology faculties. Several studies place him as the 11th most quoted psychologist in the 20th century..

In today's article we will learn more about psychologist Gordon Allport through his most memorable quotes and phrases.

1. People who are aware of or ashamed of their prejudices are also those who are on the road to eliminating them.

On the other hand, those who are proud of them are rarely able to see beyond them.

2. Personality "is" and "does". Personality is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual.

It is the driving force behind our behavior and our way of being.

3. If a person is able to rectify his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence, then he is not prejudiced. Prejudices only become prejudices if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all the evidence that would destabilize it. We tend to grow emotionally when a prejudice is threatened by contradiction. Thus, the difference between common misjudgments and prejudices is that a misjudgment can be discussed and rectified without emotional resistance.

In this famous phrase, Gordon Allport clearly explains the difference between prejudices and errors of judgment.

4. Love, incomparably the best psychotherapeutic agent, is something that professional psychiatry alone cannot create, concentrate or release.

On the capacity of love to repair emotional wounds.

5. As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot stop thinking in a partisan way.

Another quote from Gordon Allport that focuses on cognitive biases.

6. The theist is convinced that while nothing that contradicts science is likely to be true, yet nothing that stops with science can be the whole truth.

On how beliefs determine our attitudes.

7. The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long-term intentions. A good parent, a good neighbor, a good citizen, is not good because his or her specific goals are acceptable, but because his or her successive goals are ordered to a reliable and socially desirable set of values.

In this famous quote, Gordon Allport explains how day-to-day actions and goals maintain a long-term coherence for each individual and his or her self-concept.

8. The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. In fact, the measure of our intellectual maturity, suggests one philosopher, is our ability to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.

Thus philosophy advances and, with it, the knowledge we have about reality.

9. Reason adapts impulses and beliefs to the real world. Rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the individual's impulses and beliefs. Reasoning discovers the true cause of our actions; rationalization finds good reasons to justify our actions.

Another sentence about the role of our beliefs and our rational apparatus in thinking about our own actions.

10. Frustrated lives have the most hatred conditioned by character.

Do you know the difference between character, personality and temperament? Allport points out a characteristic he observed in many real cases.

11. Open-mindedness is considered a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot happen. A new experience must be lived and assumed in old categories that already exist in our mind. We cannot handle each event by itself. If so, would past experience be useful?

One of the personality traits, openness to experience, and a reflection by Allport on how our cognition lives these new realities.

12. There is an anecdote about an Oxford student who once remarked, "I despise all Americans, but I have never met one I didn't like."

Another famous quote from Gordon Allport on prejudice.

13. Mature religious sentiment is ordinarily formed in the workshop of doubt.

As Carl Gustav Jung would say, religiosity could be the overcompensation of doubt.

14. Each person is a language unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

Language and communication were also interesting fields of study for Gordon Allport.

15. Love received and love offered constitute the best form of therapy.

Can love be a therapeutic tool? Few psychologists doubt it.